First published: 09th November 2012
RTHK reports that Tse Man-lai, the owner of an information technology firm, has been jailed for nine months for two counts of accessing computers with dishonest or criminal intent.
Mr Tse was arrested following Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange's regulatory disclosure website, HKExnews on 10th to 12th August 2011. The attacks led to shares in several companies being suspended for a short time because they had made price-sensitive announcements when communications were disrupted.
He initially pleaded not guilty in the District Court on 24th September 2012, where the prosecution claimed that a DDoS attack was launched from a computer at Tse's mother's home, and a blog post titled, "Ernest Networking teaching", that demonstrated the attack on HKExnews, asked people to subscribe to the author's DDoS prevention method and included the web address of Pacswitch Globe Telecom. Tse admitted that he was the only user of the computer at the home he shares with his mother, which was used to launch the attacks.
A police spokesman welcomed the ruling.
